XORP is an open-sourceInternet Protocolroutingsoftware suite originally designed at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, California. The name is derived from eXtensible Open Router Platform. It supports OSPF, BGP, RIP, PIM, IGMP, OLSR. The product is designed from principles of software modularity and extensibility and aims at exhibiting stability and providing feature requirements for production use while also supporting networking research. The development project was founded by Mark Handley in 2000. Receiving funding from Intel, Microsoft, and the National Science Foundation, it released its first production software in July 2004. The project was then run by Atanu Ghosh of the InternationalComputer Science Institute, in Berkeley, California. In July 2008, the International Computer Science Institute transferred the XORP technology to a new entity, XORP Inc., a commercial startup founded by the leaders of the opensource project team and backed by Onset Ventures and Highland Capital Partners. In February 2010, XORP Inc. was wound up, a victim of the recession. However the open source project continued, with the servers based at University College London. In March 2011, Ben Greear became the project maintainer and the www.xorp.org server is now hosted by Candela Technologies. The XORP codebase consists of around 670,000 lines of C++ and is developed primarily on Linux, but supported on FreeBSD, OpenBSD, DragonFlyBSD, NetBSD. Support for XORP on Microsoft Windows was recently re-added to the development tree. XORP is available for download as a Live CD or as source code via the project's homepage. The software suite was selected commercially as the routing platform for the Vyatta line of products in its early releases, but later has been replaced with quagga.
Routing features
As of 2009, the project supports the following routing protocols:
XORP provides a command line interface for interactive configuration and operation monitoring. The interface is implemented as a distinct application called xorpsh, that may be invoked by multiple users simultaneously. It interacts via interprocess communication with the router core modules. The command line language is modelled after that of Juniper Networks's JunOS platform.
